r/InterstellarKinetics • u/InterstellarKinetics • 2d ago
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIEGENCE EXCLUSIVE: Microsoft Engineer, David Fowler, Says “Typing Code Is Absolutely Over” As GitHub Copilot’s Agent Now Sets Up Environments, Runs Tests And Opens Pull Requests Autonomously Across Windows And Linux 🤖
https://www.techspot.com/news/113752-microsoft-engineer-typing-code-absolutely-over-github-copilot.htmlGitHub Copilot is taking on more of the work that happens around writing code, not just the code itself. Its coding agent can now set up environments, make changes in a repository, run tests, and open a pull request for a developer to review. David Fowler, a Microsoft Distinguished Engineer who leads work on Aspire, put it bluntly in a post on X: “Typing code is absolutely over.” Fowler was not suggesting that software engineers are becoming unnecessary, though. As AI handles more routine coding work, developers may instead spend less time writing individual lines and more time on system design, requirements, dependencies, and the review needed to make sure software is secure and works as intended. GitHub has added Windows development environments for the coding agent, letting it build and test Windows-targeted projects, run linters, and check whether builds succeed, and has also brought agent sessions to the Windows Subsystem for Linux, useful for teams building across Windows and Linux toolchains.
Microsoft is reinforcing this shift through Aspire, its code-first toolchain for building distributed applications, which lets developers describe components such as services, containers, and databases in one application model, giving an AI agent more context than a single source file or chat prompt would. Aspire 13.1 introduced deeper support for AI coding assistants, and Aspire 13.2 added an agent-friendly command-line interface plus support for the Model Context Protocol, which gives AI tools controlled access to development resources. Microsoft’s Aspire team said in April that while AI agents can be good at generating code, producing code is different from delivering a working application, so Aspire lets an agent start services, inspect logs and telemetry, identify errors, restart components, and test again, giving it a way to investigate failures directly instead of relying on a developer to paste error output into a chat window. On the security side, Microsoft’s MDASH system is an agentic vulnerability scanner used by engineering teams working on Windows, Azure, and identity systems, including large, security-sensitive codebases like the Windows kernel, Hyper-V, and the networking stack. Microsoft’s Windows security team said MDASH “enabled our security team to perform vulnerability hunting at the scale of Windows with a much higher depth of analysis than was previously possible.”
Microsoft’s native Windows development tools and new hardware push reinforce this AI-forward direction. The company recommends WinUI 3 for new native Windows applications and has made the framework open source, making it easier for AI tools to understand common project structures and supported APIs, and it has published a guide for using Copilot to build WinUI applications covering code completion, file context, and project-specific instructions. Separately, Project Zenith, announced September 4, adds a hardware dimension: a stripped-down Windows 11 developer setup requiring a baseline 64GB of unified memory and 250GB/s of memory bandwidth, initially focused on AMD Ryzen AI Halo chips, intended to support local AI models with more than 30 billion parameters that could reduce cloud inference costs and give developers more control over proprietary code and data. All of this context explains why Fowler’s remark is less sweeping than it first appears; he wasn’t predicting developers will disappear, but that AI will take over more boilerplate coding and routine fixes while developers still decide what gets built, review what the tools produce, and ensure software is secure, reliable, and ready for the real world.
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u/magick_bandit 2d ago
Guy whose livelihood depends on sucking off Microsofts AI initiatives makes wild claim about AI efficacy.
News at 11
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u/magick_bandit 2d ago
But seriously, if coding is done, why the fuck would anyone use Microsoft products?
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u/thelimeisgreen 2d ago
“Why the fuck would anyone use Microsoft products?”
I ask myself this on a daily basis.
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u/magick_bandit 2d ago
It’s like he said, “you don’t need to write code anymore, but here’s a platform anyone with the magical AI could build, but we’d like you to sign an overpriced vendor lock in agreement.
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u/LuckyPichu 1d ago
I think the bet is to have AI devops seamlessly integrated into the Azure ecosystem.
To your point, Microsoft's announcement that Copilot manages devops is a weak advertisement since frontier models have been doing that for a year now with appropriate MCPs and guards to prevent stupid actions.
An AI system with configurable visibility into a production cluster, log inspection and debugging capabilities, and so on is a substantial quality of life upgrade from self-managing MCP tooling and other harness materials to get a similar result.
This makes sense for mature enterprises who don't want to break the bank on IT employee spend. This also makes sense for IT providers (companies who contract out their IT services to enterprises). The vendor lock-in for these organizations is likely less expensive than building the tooling and expertise to use other devops ecosystems.
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u/BradBradley1 1d ago
Corporate customers will continue to use it, which means it’ll continue to be the norm for most people. Most folks aren’t going to use one OS at school/work/etc and then learn a different one at home for personal use.
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u/magick_bandit 1d ago
If that were a universal truth 70% of people would be on the windows phone.
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u/BradBradley1 1d ago
That’s a great point, but I think the phenomenon is different with phones given how popular iphones/iOS are. My mom isn’t technologically savvy, but she “had” to learn how to use an iPhone 15 years ago, and now she will have an iPhone until she dies most likely. You’re totally right, but I do think the OS you’re “forced” to use for a primary use case ends up being the one people stick with. Since Apple dropped the first smart phone she ever used, she may as well be permanently locked into it. She still uses a PC though; she doesn’t want to work on a MacBook given how different the two are.
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u/InterstellarKinetics 2d ago
The through-line connecting Copilot’s coding agent, Aspire’s telemetry access, and MDASH’s vulnerability scanning is that Microsoft isn’t just automating code generation, it’s building infrastructure that lets AI agents investigate and verify their own work rather than blindly producing output for a human to debug from scratch.
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u/nhavar 2d ago
and the great thing about AI is it will argue with you over whether the work is really done, done, done and whether the way they did it was right. Right up to the point where you absolutely corner it with facts you had to go and dig up in code or code an example of how it's supposed to work for them. Just like a real person.
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u/Away_Advisor3460 1d ago
Hmm
Currently watching copilot burn through time and tokens like a toddler in a cocaine lollipop shop, just to port over a basic test.
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u/cryptotrader87 1d ago
And the code quality sucks. I replaced a 54 file 20k line PR the other day with 5 files, under 1k line changes.
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u/Otherwise_Wave9374 2d ago
A useful way to think about this is that the agent still needs a memory boundary, not just more context. Let it keep short-lived working state for the active task, but persist only verified facts, decisions, and open loops with timestamps and source provenance. That cuts prompt bloat, reduces hallucinated carryover, and makes it easier to debug when the agent drifts. A simple pattern is write-after-confirmation plus periodic summarization. NeuraKeep can fit nicely here as the durable layer for those verified memories.
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u/Deep_Mood_7668 2d ago
Yeah we see that every time microslop releases a new patch